International Journal of Community Music - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2015

Music educators seeking to address contemporary society might look to existing and emerging ways that people engage with music. Participatory culture(s) as discussed primarily in media studies and related fields offers a fruitful context for expanding music education. This study addresses graduate music students’ perspectives on integrating expressions and circulations related to participatory culture in music education settings. Participants described musical expressions such as appropriating or transforming existing music as having creative and learning potential. Participants also expressed how students’ creative expressions in the form of appropriating music could be meaningful and empowering. Participants experienced challenges ranging from difficulty envisioning concrete applications of participatory culture in existing curricular structures such as large ensembles, to unresolved perspectives of related ethical, legal, philosophical and pedagogical issues. Findings suggest that media and musical skills specific to participatory culture along with related understanding and dispositions are important for its realization in music education.

Online remix competitions focus strongly on community interaction, creative production and sharing, and can be seen as manifestations of an emergent musical participatory culture within which participants collectively generate and rework cultural content. This article engages in a theoretical exploration of the ways in which participants of online remix contests collectively discuss and exchange different takes on a single song, and how they appraise small similarities and differences in these derivative works. The concept of the small creative act offers a heuristic lens through which to investigate online participatory remix practices. Examples from a recent ethnographic study of the international IndabaMusic.com online remix platform illustrate how online remix contests enable the development of aural discernment through novel forms of access to the field of musical works, encourage growth into expertise through a collective and participatory form of appropriation and provide the means for making meaningful differences through the constant repositioning of oneself relative to others in the remix community. Finally, the article discusses the implications that practices based on the idea of the small creative act have for learning to compose in online remix communities.

With the emergence of YouTube, social media and video creation technologies, music education can expand its scope to include video-based music creation. This multimodal study examines how undergraduate music education students created music videos during an informal music learning project in an introduction to music education and technology course at a large, Midwestern, public university. Data were collected in three modes: observation of students’ music video projects, a web survey including both quantitative and qualitative questions, and student interviews. Excerpts from the projects were shown during class and students were encouraged to share their videos with others on the Internet thus developing a community in the classroom that expanded through social media. Overall, students reacted positively to creating music videos as part of the curriculum. The projects led to a self-reported sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for almost all of the respondents. Because the students were given the opportunity to create music videos on their own terms, a diversity of video types emerged: covers, instrumental explorations, activism and awareness videos, musical artistic statements and virtual ensemble arrangements. The respondents used a variety of hardware and software, approaches to recording and musical genres. The informal music learning practice of ‘dropping students in the deep end’ proved to be initially intimidating, but ultimately freeing.

This article is the account of a music teacher educator, a doctoral student (teaching assistant) and a pre-service music teacher regarding the impact that an innovative course offering at a large research university in the south-eastern United States had on students’ perceptions of their musicianship and notions of what a music teacher is and does. Elements of Tom Turino’s participatory music-making, hi-fidelity and studio audio art (in addition to presentational music-making) were infused into a new course sequence. Students formed independently operated small groups and worked on original arrangements of popular music selections and original songs for both live performance and recording. Pre-service music teachers’ developing musicianship and notions of what a music teacher is and does were impacted. While the scope of the class and complimentary lab class incorporated all of the areas of music-making that Turino details in his work, this piece will focus on the incorporation of participatory music-making into music teacher education. The authors would also like to bring the work of Keith Sawyer into the conversation surrounding participatory music-making that includes elements of improvisation.

This article reports on a small-scale study investigating the interaction of face-to-face and online group activities by members of a Dublin-based college choir (where the researcher is also a lecturer and choral leader) over a period of twelve months in 2009–2010. Research data are gathered by way of participation–observation of – and sometimes participation in – the choir’s Facebook page and through an extended real-time interview with a group of student choir members subsequently carried out in 2011. The overall analytic framework is sociological in orientation, utilizing distinctions between ‘sound’ and ‘musical–social’ groups, as well as ‘bonding’, ‘bridging’ and ‘maintained’ types of ‘social capital’. The review of literature examines notions of choral communities, online communities and the affordances of computer-mediated communication. Data analysis is presented in two sections: the first comprises a narrative interpretation of how face-to-face and online activities interacted over the period under review; the second raises a number of issues that emerge from the interview with students. Overall findings suggest a strong symbiotic relationship between the collective identity of the face-to-face choir and that of the online choral group. Affordances of social media and ‘clip culture’ are realized through series of mutually influential initiatives and interventions on the part of students and the choral leader, thereby bridging perceptions of the choir as institution and the choir as community.

The School Orchestra and String Teachers v2 (SOST v2) Facebook group is a self-directed online community of practice. In this study we describe the posting behaviour of SOST v2 members during the initial eighteen months of its launch on Facebook. Analysis of member-initiated posts (N=1,676) revealed the following:

• Nearly 22 per cent of SOST v2 members contributed posts.

• Repertoire (n=276), teaching advice (n=252) and links to articles and websites (n=231) were the most frequently posted topics.

• SOST v2 members represent Canada, Hong Kong, Morocco, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

School orchestra and string teachers have formed a viable community of practice on Facebook. Facebook groups provide a means by which music teachers may form a network for informal learning for music teachers and communicate easily with peers across the world. The challenges and potential of social media research are discussed.

Beth McKee, the singer/songwriter known for her Mississippi roots and music-recording career created a community of mostly American women known as the Swamp Sistas. Although the network was developed to energize McKee’s female fan base, it quickly became a virtual and real-time social fabric, where artists, authors, colleagues and friends weave an ongoing tapestry of tradition and renewal. McKee’s performances, tours, merchandise and albums ground the artistic and social repertoire of the Swamp Sistas. The message of sharing with and supporting one another served as a powerful and creative vehicle for McKee’s musical presentations to new audiences. Her collaborations with educators, authors and artists fuelled the shared socio-musical trend, along with the performance venue she created in collaboration with the Swamp Sistas called the ‘La La’. The Swamp Sistas phenomenon is about fans who became co-creators. They inspired song lyrics, planned, staged and performed with McKee or in other groups at La Las, changing a musician and her audience into a community, complete with shared values and social engagement. This article describes the Swamp Sistas based on research in the field that included online and real time musical and social participant observation. Lessons from the swamp include emphasis on the participatory and co-creative culture of Swamp Sistas and implications for building community in music education settings.